We are in the penultimate day of the Shanghai Major with Team Secret claiming their second Finals spot at a Dota 2 Major after a great victory against Team Liquid in the upper bracket finals.
The Shanghai Major has been almost a saga for Team Secret who fought hard in all their upper bracket series where they faced all the strong contenders for the winter title. They knocked down OG, Evil Geniuses and today the first Divine Rapier for Envy secured the grand finals spot.
For both of the games played in the best-of-three series Team Liquid opened the bans with two of Clement 'Puppey' Ivanov’s signature heroes, Chen and Enigma and allowed Aliwi 'w33' Omar to get his one of the most successful picks since he joined Secret; Windranger for the first game and Invoker for game two.
An odd last pick Legion Commander from Team Liquid in the first game draft, had almost no impact for them. With no successful early ganks to stop w33’s lane dominance, Liquid couldn't match Secret’s teamfight potential Only thirteen minutes into the game, a triple kill was secured for Jacky 'EternaLEnVy' Mao’s Spectre and Liquid was shortly after forced to either turtle into their base or go for bold actions like Roshan kills while they had the base exposed.
A last desperate decision was taken around the 40 minute mark when Lasse 'MATUMBAMAN' Urpalainen had to buy a Divine Rapier for his Gyrocopter and attempt a full five man high ground push mid lane. Unfortunately the rapier was dropped and immediately after Team Liquid called out the GG.
It was the day of new heroes for Puppy who drafted himself the first competitive Earth Spirit coupled with the pieliedie’s impeccable Lion and let w33 to duel Liquid’s Death Prophet with an Invoker.
The laning phase was more of a calibrating reaction time on his new hero for Puppey who failed a few times with the ES rolls and allowed Liquid to execute their aggressive push line-up. Secret had the mid lane racks exposed at the 29 minute mark but still managed to punish Liquid after all the big ultimates were spent, taking down four of their heroes. However, once they had the Aegis advantage, Liquid continued the disciplined objective game with high ground push attempts and slowly but surely they were chopping Secret’s buildings bit by bit.
EternaLEnVy decided to stop the pressure and attempted to ambush the pushing party from behind. Spotted by a sentry ward he ended up feeding a crucial kill and empowered Liquid to accelerate their building demolishing frenzy, taking no less than two whole sets of racks.
Secret had to do something to not be pushed to a decisive game three and at the 37 minute mark decided to finally contest the Roshan Aegis-Cheese. Perfect coordination between Invoker and Lion and superior overall team fight approached wipe Liquid in the river and two minutes later EnVy Rapier time came online.
Only three minutes later he finds four Liquid heroes in the dire jungle and the Slark - Rapier power comes into play to wipe Liquid once again.
Left with no Buybacks available Liquid had to watch how team Secret was able to take two lanes of racks through backdoor protection and finally called out the gg when they respawned just to immediately die to Slark for the last time.
This doesn’t mean it’s all lost for Team Liquid, they still have a chance to come back from the lower bracket finals where they will face the winner of the Evil Geniuses vs MVP Phoenix series.
